Andra Sachs and Brad Sachs, shown in 2010, were partners in Plug-In Solutions in San Juan Capistrano. They were slain in their home Feb. 9. Their young son was shot and left paralyzed and a daughter was shot at but escaped injury. FILE PHOTO: PAUL BERSEBACH, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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In this San Juan Capistrano home, Bradford and Andra Sachs were shot to death, their young son paralyzed and their daughter shot at. Another son, Ashton Sachs, has been charged with murder and attempted murder. FILE PHOTO: ANNA REED, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

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Ashton Sachs was arrested nearly a month after his parents were found shot to death in their multimillion-dollar San Juan Capistrano home. FACEBOOK

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A sheriff's deputy escorts relatives of Ashton Sachs from the Orange County Jail after his arraignment hearing this month on charges of murdering his parents. FILE PHOTO: SAM GANGWER, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Ashton Sachs

April 20, 1994: Ashton Colby Sachs is born to Bradford Hans Sachs and Andra Resa Sachs.

2000: Bradford and Andra Sachs divorce. They later reconcile but don't remarry for financial reasons.

Spring 2012: Ashton graduates Dana Hills High School.

Fall 2013: Ashton enrolls at North Seattle Community College.

Feb. 9, 2014: Bradford and Andra Sachs are shot to death in their home on Peppertree Bend in San Juan Capistrano. Their 8-year-old adopted son is shot and paralyzed, and their 17-year-old daughter is shot at but not injured.

Feb. 18, 2014: Investigators urge the public to come forward with information. "Someone has to know something," said Lt. Jeff Hallock, Orange County sheriff's spokesman.

Feb. 24, 2014: Ashton Sachs and his older brother, Myles Sachs, file documents in San Diego County Superior Court asking that Myles Saxhs to be appointed guardian of their younger siblings, including the 8-year-old boy.

March 6, 2014: Ashton Sachs is arrested in Coronado, where he and his siblings had relocated, in the slaying of his parents and the shootings involving his brother and sister.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – Ashton Sachs grew up in luxury homes, impressed his teachers and spent time on activities typical of an Orange County teenager: playing video games, taking photos of beach sunsets and holding a part-time job, his at Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters.

But the 19-year-old, charged this month with murder in the deaths of his parents - an attack that left his 8-year-old brother paralyzed - had another life much different from his friends. He bounced from town to town during his parents’ bitter divorce, served process papers to enraged tenants with whom his mother was feuding, and at age 5 dealt with the accidental drowning of his baby sister.

The baby’s death ripped the family apart and contributed to struggles that culminated with Sachs’ arrest this month in the Feb. 9 shooting deaths of Bradford and Andra Sachs and the wounding of his brother, Landon, as well as a charge of attempting to murder his 17-year-old sister, Alexis, in the family’s ridgetop mansion.

As the teenager sits in jail awaiting arraignment Friday on charges that could send him to death row if convicted, interviews and court documents offer a complex portrait of the young man while offering few clues about a possible motive for a crime that prosecutors describe as brutal.

Summers, of Laguna Niguel, said she believes her nephew had been planning the killings since last fall – about the time he moved to Seattle with his older brother, 22-year-old Myles Sachs. She detailed her concerns about her nephews’ motives in a five-page declaration she filed March 13 in San Diego County Superior Court that sought custody of Landon and her two nieces, Alexis and Lana.

But she told the Register on Wednesday that she has changed her mind and is no longer interested in custody “because I have my own kids and it’s too much for me."

“Any mother with teenage kids would know that those years are very difficult,” she said.

PARENTAL BATTLES

Ashton’s father, Bradford, grew up as somewhat of a surfing prince in Orange County. His father, Harold “Hal” Sachs, was a pioneer tandem surfer who won the Huntington Tandem in 1969 and ’70 and the U.S. Surfboard Championship in 1971.

Brad Sachs, a 1975 graduate of San Clemente High School, shared his father’s passion for the waves. In documents filed in his divorce from Andra Sachs granted in March 2000, she said heplayed drums and golf "as often as possible” and was “surfing every day.”

“The children are important and I know he loves them, but he has never been responsible for their primary care nor has he spent much time involving himself in their presence,” she wrote, adding that until summer 1999, a nanny cared for the children much of the day.

Meanwhile, Brad Sachs accused his wife of having a psychological problem “that results in manic sessions that are unpredictable, unfathomable and incapable of being rationalized.”

“In an effort to spare my children from the raging, I left the family residence and took up temporary housing elsewhere,” he wrote in a document dated Jan. 10, 2000.

Brad Sachs sought the divorce in November 1999, about six months after the couple’s first-born daughter, Sabrina, drowned in the family swimming pool in Huntington Beach. Investigators determined the death was accidental, according to the Orange County coroner’s office. Andra Sachs later testified in an unrelated court hearing that the girl fell into the pool and drowned while a nanny was supposed to be watching.

The loss of the child devastated the Sachses. Andra sought counseling, but no one else reportedly received help to cope with tragedy – not Brad, not 7-year-old Myles and not 5-year-old Ashton.

TRAVEL WITH MOM

The girl’s death came amid trouble with the Internet broadband company, Flashcom, that made Andra and Brad Sachs much money.

A legal dispute involving $9 million that the company’s board of directors gave Andra Sachs to leave the business remains unresolved. A trustee appointed by the government to assess the company’s bankruptcy maintains the money should go to help pay the company’s massive debt, said the trustee’s lawyer, David Weinstein of Los Angeles.

Andra Sachs moved to Nevada during the divorce but also spent time in Florida and Hawaii, where the family owns property – part of a multistate, multimillion-dollar portfolio that includes luxury homes, apartment complexes and modest rentals in California, Hawaii, Nevada and Florida.

Ashton Sachs and his brother and sister often traveled with their mother. They witnessed vicious fights between their parents, including a screaming argument just after the separation when Brad Sachs arrived to pick up the children.

A couple of months later, Andra Sachs emailed her husband a message purportedly written by their son Myles, criticizing his father for an incident at his eighth birthday party. “I think you are rotten,” reads the email, which is included in the divorce file.

On March 3, 2000, Newport Beach police arrested Brad Sachs on suspicion of domestic violence after his wife accused him of backing his car into hers while the children were inside. The charge was dismissed.

But the couple soon reconciled. They never remarried, but they stayed together, eventually moving to a mansion in Laguna Beach, then to the Peppertree Bend home in San Juan Capistrano where the shootings took place.

SERVED DOCUMENTS

As the years passed, the family grew. Friends say Andra Sachs spent months in Russia several years ago securing the adoption of Landon and Lana. She planned to adopt just the boy but adopted Lana, too, after learning Landon had a sister.

She didn’t want to separate them, said Laura Villa, a Costa Mesa and Palm Springs real estate agent who was friends with Andra Sachs and offers a different picture of the parents at a different time. “They were just lovely, loving people,” Villa said. “The children always came first.”

In San Juan Capistrano, the couple continued their business ventures, receiving a series of small-claims court filings from angry tenants, to which they often responded with claims of their own. They also were sued by a woman over a faulty electric car converter bought from the Sachses’ former San Juan Capistrano company, Plug In Solutions. The business operated out of a building on Calle Perfecto still owned by the family.

The couple enlisted their sons to help with the businesses and legal work. When Ashton Sachs was 18, he served documents to a couple in Menifee who had sued his mother over conditions at their rental home. The case prompted several Internet message boards, including one headlined “The Devil Wears Andra Sachs, not Prada.”

SOLID STUDENT

Ashton and Myles Sachs moved to Seattle last fall and registered several companies in Washington with their mother. Ashton Sachs enrolled at North Seattle Community College, continuing an educational path that had earned him accolades before graduating in 2012 from Dana Hills High School.

Ashton Sachs’ former information-technology teacher, Paul McManus, who honored him with an achievement award, thought so highly of his student that when a reporter first called seeking comment about his arrest, McManus assumed the stranger was seeking a job reference for Sachs, saying “I’d hire him in a heartbeat.”

Sachs, one of dozens of teenagers hired to work at Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters, was an online gamer for several years, regularly posting to Internet message boards devoted to League of Legends and World of Warcraft.

He also regularly commented on a Facebook group; his last message there, posted Feb. 5, “Satan is that you?”, was an apparent reference to the game’s ban of the word Satan.

Four days later, police say, Sachs killed his parents and tried to kill his younger brother and sister after driving nearly 1,200 miles from a condominium in the Lake City area of Seattle.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home after Lana called 911 just before 2 a.m. Paramedics found Brad and Andra Sachs dead in their bedroom; officials say they believe Ashton Sachs went to Landon’s bedroom to shoot him after he killed his parents. He is accused of shooting at Alexis, but she was uninjured.

GUARDIANSHIP SOUGHT

Detectives say Ashton Sachs flew back to Seattle the next morning. Within days, he was at Lyla’s Family Espresso, a coffeehouse he frequented about four miles from his condo.

“We were trying to cheer him up a bit,” co-owner Dennis Miller said. “But he sure ... wasn’t acting the part of distraught or anything.”

Soon after the killings, Myles and Ashton Sachs moved their sisters to a three-bedroom home in the Coronado Cays, south of San Diego, which their mother had recently purchased. They enlisted their parents’ longtime lawyers, Walter and Jonathan Weiss, to help secure guardianship of their sisters as well as Landon, who was at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo for weeks before being released to a rehabilitation center.

The actions raised the suspicion of Summers, their aunt, who questioned their motives in her March 13 declaration.

She said Myles Sachs has spent $100,000 in the past month remodeling the Coronado home, and she criticized his decision to move his siblings there instead of to a larger place. She also questioned why the Weisses were acting as lawyers for Ashton and Myles Sachs while also serving as will and trust holders for their slain parents.

Myles Sachs declined to comment.

The children now are staying with Brad Sachs’ sister - who court documents say hasn’t had contact with her brother in years - though Myles Sachs’ guardianship has been extended until April 23. Their grandfather Hal Sachs now lives in Lebanon, Mo., and signed documents agreeing to his grandsons’ guardianship request before the arrest of Ashton Sachs, who was removed as a guardian after he was jailed.

Ebrahim Baytieh, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, said he doesn’t believe Ashton Sachs committed the crimes for money but declined to identify a possible motive.

Farrah Emami, spokeswoman for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, said the investigation continues, adding that prosecutors have yet to decide whether they’ll seek the death penalty.

Ashton Sachs’ public defender, Seth Bank, declined to comment other than to address the death penalty.

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